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France Vows to Enforce Scarf Ban Despite Threat

PARIS, Aug. 30 &#0151; In a rare display of national unity, French officials, opposition politicians and religious leaders vowed today that they will not allow the fate of two French hostages in Iraq to interfere with a new law on a piece of cloth.

The French government announced that it will implement its ban on Muslim head scarves and other conspicuous religious symbols from public schools when they open this Thursday, despite the kidnappers' demand that it is must be abolished.

"The law will be applied," a government spokesman, Jean-Fran&#0231;ois Cope, said in an interview today with Canal Plus television.

Fran&#0231;ois Hollande, the leader of the opposition Socialist Party, joined in a chorus of condemnation of the kidnapping of the journalists Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, saying, "It is democracy that is attacked and the laws of the Republic that are targeted."

"We are a country with laws," said Joseph Kaminski-Pipon, a 71-year-old retired doctor from Paris. "It's not up to a group of armed gangs, of outlaws, to settle our problems."

But there was some criticism over the wisdom of the law. "It's a mistake," said Abderazzak Hatimy, a practicing Muslim who works for Air France. "The veil is not a symbol. It's an obligation."

In Cairo, where he began an emergency diplomatic mission to free the two men, Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, pleaded for the release of the journalists, portraying them as "men of good will" who have always shown an understanding of the Iraqi people and a "fondness for the Arab and Muslim world."

The Islamic Army of Iraq, the shadowy group holding the hostages, issued a 48-hour ultimatum to France Saturday night over the head scarf ban, although it did not specifically threaten the lives of the two newsmen. Late this afternoon, the Arabic television station Al Jazeera reported that the deadline had been extended 24 hours.

The station also said that the two journalists, in a video shown on the channel, called on the French government to rescind the ban.

Islamic groups both inside and outside Iraq urged the kidnappers to release the journalists, noting France's opposition to the Iraq war and saying journalists were not combatants.

But Prime Minister Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of Iraq said bluntly that the kidnapping proved that France's position on Iraq &#0151; presumably its opposition to the war and the absence of troops &#0151; offered it no protection from terrorism.

"Neutrality doesn't exist, as the kidnapping of the French journalists has shown," Mr. Allawi said in an interview with several European and American newspapers. "The French are deluding themselves if they think they can remain outside of this. Today, the extremists are targeting them too."

Suddenly, in France as well, there is the realization that its opposition to the American-led war in Iraq has not innoculated it from Iraqi-inspired terrorism. "Nobody is safe," said an editorial in this afternoon's editions of the daily Le Monde.

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"No diplomacy can claim to be any kind of Maginot line that would protect us better than our Spanish or Italian neighbors from the death wish that has been at work since the attacks of September 11, 2001."

Indeed, in an audiotape broadcast by a Dubai-based television channel in February, Ayman Zawahiri, the second-highest-ranking figure in the Qaeda terrorist network, condemned France for "defending the freedom of nudity and depravity" and "fighting chastity and decency" with the head scarf ban, adding that such anti-Muslim acts by the West should be dealt with "by tank shells and aircraft missiles."

The fugitive also called the ban "a crime" similar to "the burning of villages with their people in Afghanistan, demolishing houses over their sleeping residents in Palestine, and killing the children of Iraq."

French Muslim leaders, meanwhile, today called the ban on religious symbols a strictly internal French issue and advised all outsiders to stay out.

"The hostage-takers are crazy people and what they are asking is madness," Thomas Milcent, a Strasbourg medical doctor and convert to Islam who runs a popular Islamic Web site, said in a telephone interview. "We don't want anyone to tell us what to do."

Still, the kidnapping has reopened the raw debate on whether the ban is a necessary means to protect the French ideal of secularism or a violation of religious freedom.

Even as the center-right French government and many Muslim leaders called for the strict separation of church and state, some Muslim leaders are calling for female Muslim students to test the limits of the law by hiding at least some of their hair.

In an interview in today's Le Figaro, the employer of Mr. Chesnot, Lhaj Thami Breze, president of the conservative Union of French Islamic Organizations, denounced the kidnappers as "the enemies of Islam."

But he also said that the law only bans "conspicuous signs" of religion. "Discreet signs are authorized. We certainly insist on this point. We hope that the administrative heads will follow the path of compromise, accepting a discreet scarf rather than imposing rules exceeding the law."

Dr. Milcent, who has set up a telephone hot line to advise students how to deal with the law, called the ban "a bad law," one that must be obeyed but is also open to interpretation.

"The law doesn't ban discreet signs," he said. "One can use a lot of imagination with discreet signs."

The French Parliament passed the religious symbol ban early this year by an overwhelming majority, underscoring broad public support for the French secular ideal but deepening resentment among a swath of France's Islamic population.

The law, which also applies to Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses, says that in public elementary and high schools the "wearing of insignia or clothes by which pupils conspicuously display their religious affiliation is prohibited." It also calls for "dialogue" with any student that violates the ban before disciplinary action is taken.